One of the most memorable tech talks I ever attended was by a junior engineer who had just come back to the office from a major conference. Our workplace had an unusually oral culture -- decisions were made in meetings, and not always written down; there wasn't much in the way of bug tracking or work planning at the time; people generally preferred to talk through problems instead of working them out in email, chat, or forum posting.

He was supposed to present a topic he learned about at the conference. Instead, he gave a cheeky talk which introduced the very concept of written language to the audience, as if we had never heard of it. Starting from the history of writing on tablets and so on, and ending in practical advice like, "when words are written down, you don't have to remember what they were exactly; you can just read the words again." I loved the chutzpah and could barely hold myself from chortling out loudly at some of his slides.

its not even writing, its the very concept of human thinking that is under question.

Why should anyone bother to think, if they can ask AI for a well researched, correct, and.. khm... "aligned" answer ?

We will be worse off for it. People just are losing the ability to read well. We are regressing as a species because of billionaire's thinking machines. A few companies are evolving while the rest of us become dependent.

Your intelligence and competencey are going to be 1:1 correlated to the quality and quantity of tokens a billionaire gives you access too (local, sure, they control the hardware markets as well).

Keep excercising your writing and reading muscles because it will definatley set you apart from the captive masses in the future.

Speaking is a culture that has served us well for 300 000 years or so. To note, it has been used for both good and bad..

I honestly think it's more likely that younger generations grow up seeing the ill effects of being AI-pilled for communication/writing, deciding by way of AI literacy that they want none of that, and develop better ideas on responsible use.

I really don't like AI for document writing as a whole, especially within organizations. Code can be a form of communication, but for the most part it's an engineered thing that can be re-run, tested, verified and so on. But documents drive decision-making, and decision making is often one-time. Decisions should be studied and understood, and depriving authors of much of both is not having any good effects.

Oh my god, Socrates was right all along!

Chilling.

try speaking from your own perspective instead of assuming a universal one. your opinions, however unhinged, will come off as more genuine.

As it always should have been. Even Plato/Socrates were intelligent enough to muse about the idea that writing has degraded our memory vs when we had to memorize entire epic poems. They had a lot of hostile stuff to say about writing in Timaeus and other works.

The fact that most teachers refuse to do in-person oral exams has always been due to laziness, incompetence, and the reality of the economics of dealing with classroom sizes where 30 is considered small.

AI voice synthesis and robots/projectors are a thing. Slop will arrive in the boardrooms and on podiums sooner than many suspect.

I’m only half joking that someone will come up with a LLM text to speech synthesizer that pauses and plays depending on if your mouth is closed/jaw is moving. Analysizes your voice to synthesize as well.